Inderpal Grewal

On her book Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America

Cover Interview of February 18, 2018

The wide angle

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations
or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over
the last decade, there has been a shift in the way many of us outside of the
academic discipline of international relations have become engaged in questions
of security. We focus on how it affects people in their everyday lives, how it
changes the behavior of people in communities and families towards one another,
and the costs of the focus on protection. While international relations as an
academic discipline does not, with some exceptions, address questions of gender,
race or class, I find those are key questions with regard to security.

There is an extended examination of policing and violence in
African American communities (though never in so-called “security studies”),
but this is of interest also in relation to the wars on terrorism. How do
projects of state security against terrorism, a pervasive logic of recent wars,
come to shape our lives and change our relationships to each other as citizens
and as inhabitants of a region, a country and a planet? Many of us think that
we need to be much more critical of this concept of terrorism and security and
take the study of security out of the hands of the so-called “security experts.”

Security is an emotion, a feeling of fear and a desire for
safety that we as humanists examine as crucial to political life. It changes
families, communities, relationships. It sells products and weapons for
protection. It maintains the power of masculinity, patriarchy and in a related
way, of oligarchy. Feminism has long questioned how the rationale of protection
has constrained and controlled women by positioning powerful men as both
perpetrator and protector. Security creates fear that can allow authoritarian
regimes and many corporations to profit from us. It is also a concept that is
so open, because we can never have enough security, so it remains a powerful
form of ideological control. It works through surveillance and suspicion of
others around us or even of those far away from us. In the U.S., fear of
immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, feminists and LGBTQ persons are seen as threats to
the heteronormative “American” family and the nation.

Security is also a way to define the contemporary U.S. state
and a kind of government that focuses more on state security, and one that uses
policing rather than a safety net as a rationale for governing. Instead, the
security state uses fear and policing to repress protests and it wages
unrelenting war on those inside and outside the country. We see this
authoritarianism not just in the U.S., but also in many other regions of the
world, though the U.S. case is somewhat different in that it is a superpower, and
the ways that Americans participate in the security project comes from a
particular history of imperialism. As scholars and researchers, we need to think
about what this security state is doing to us, and to examine its effects on
ordinary people. How is it that we live in a country where little children have
to practice lockdown drills in their schools because the government is unable
to stop the proliferation of weapons on our streets? We are once again living with
the kinds of fears that were engendered during the Cold War, though now what we
see are endless wars.

This book comes from almost four decades of studying the
effect of empires on ordinary people. I began my research career studying how
British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century affected
both British and Indian women and created what could be called “imperial
culture.” I then turned to studying U.S. imperialism, examining how it alters and
shaped immigrants and citizens. My 2005 book, Transnational America, examined
how the idea of America circulated around the world through concepts such as
human rights, trade in American goods and the attraction of the American dream.
In that book, I ended with looking at racism against South Asian Sikhs and
Muslims after 9/11. This new book tracks how that context has now changed in
the new century, especially as the notion of wars on terror have expanded to
more regions around the world. Terrorism is now a concept that so many
governments are using to repress their populations even as we don’t know
clearly how to define it in non-racist ways. We now have draconian laws and
military ventures based on a concept that few can describe clearly.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011